Saw a nice article on www.physorg.com today about last week’s Imperial/NPG Climate Change conference.
Couple of quotations:
Professor Blunt… says his experience online showed him how civilised virtual conferences could be. He adds: “Since the days of Socrates people have understood the importance of meeting face-to-face. However, I think we’ll see more academics and students meeting in virtual spaces in the future because it wipes out travel costs, lessens our environmental impact, and reduces the hassle of travelling, especially for non-European academics and students whose travel can often be frustrated by visa restrictions.”
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change… says his first experience of delivering a virtual lecture was very positive… However, he did say that there were some drawbacks. “I like to gesticulate when I am communicating and I obviously couldn’t convey that through my avatar. So I had to remember to get my message across to the virtual audience verbally,”… As this technology evolves so that characters can sense each other’s gestures and movements, I can see this being an even more important tool for exchanging information between people,”
It’s a much longer article than that, and definitely worth reading in full.
